Excellent documentary on the making of the epic 1973 film The Spook Who Sat By the Door. Trailer here. Showing now at the Siskel Theatre in Chicago.
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
R.I.P. Gil Scott-Heron
I just saw this morning that (Chicago native) Gil Scott-Heron has passed away at the age of 62 in New York (obits here, here, here and here). What a loss. I'll write something more substantive soon, but for now, enjoy two selections:
Saturday, January 22, 2011
How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)
Here are couple of quotes from the excellent How to Eat Your Watermelon, a documentary about the life and work of Melvin Van Peebles (filmmaker, actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, novelist, etc.):
"I was sick and tired of always seeing black people walking into a lynch mob with a hymn and a bible. I wanted to make a movie that black people could walk out of standing tall."I highly recommend the documentary. Trailer below.
"I read an article about how blacks could move into the mainstream, if they'd only remember their manners, etc... So I wrote an article, guy wouldn't publish it, called "How to eat your watermelon in the company of white people (and enjoy it)"... that sort of Judo was one of the major elements of Sweetback. I took every stereotype and stood it on its head."
"All my life I had seen X-rated movies, if X-rated means damaging to young minds. Well, there was Tarzan, there was King-Kong, there was Mantan Moreland, etc. etc. and I couldn't find in my mind, anything more devastating to the psyche of a young African-American than those things. If you don't call those things X, then I think you've lost your credibility to judge."
Monday, October 18, 2010
"Scientific" Racism 2.0
While the eugenics morons doing "evolutionary" psychology are busy finding ways to explain away social injustice with pseudo-arguments about genetic determination of social hierarchies... the ostensibly more progressive (and, typically, more empirically sound) discipline of sociology is seeing a resurgence of racist "culture of poverty" ideas.
Switching gears to more respectable sociological research programs, I don't happen to think that the sociology of knowledge is complete. That is, I don't think it is able to give a full account of it's own conditions of possibility, or of the extent to which it also produces knowledge of the social determinants of what's already recognized as knowledge, etc. But it's pretty damned useful for politics, and the above is a case in point. That is, we should be asking the following sorts of questions about the "culture of poverty" ideology: whose interests are served by it? What is the functional role of this ideology in maintaining and stabilizing existing hierarchies and inequalities? In what institutional and political context did this ideology develop? What political or historical shifts are to explain its decline and subsequent reemergence?
There is no place for the disinterested, neutral gaze of natural science in the discussion of the "culture of poverty" ideas. They've been refuted several times over. Their genetic properties, so to speak, (i.e. their lineage, where they emerged from historically) are damning, as the article above makes clear. So to present these ideas as possible contenders among other neutral ways of making sense of deep social inequalities is already to do something ethically and politically suspect.
The fact is that in the face of the continuing oppression of non-white peoples, the idea of a "culture of poverty" is a convenient way of blaming the victims and tabling demands for justice. It says, in effect, that there is no racism, no oppression, no unequal relations of power, no historic injustice: only "pathological" groups who have a faulty culture, who need to "pull their pants up" and "act white". That's got to be music to the ears of conservative, white suburbanites. But any critical program would take that fact as grounds to reject the ideology entirely.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
In defense of the mullet
Interesting, nuanced article on the cultural politics of the mullet here. Demolishes the "fashion is just a matter of individual taste" argument.
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